Sophie

by Guy Burt

  “What do we do now?” I said.

  “I want to know who they are,” Sophie said. She seemed to be thinking for a moment, and then she said, “Stay here. I’m going to have a look—shan’t be long.”

  I stared after her as she scrambled over the wall and headed down towards the farm below.

  Sophie was gone for nearly a quarter of an hour. After ten minutes had passed, I grew worried, not certain what might have happened. I’d seen her walk around the perimeter of the barn, pause at one point to put her face close to the metal as if peering through a hole, and then go around to the entrance and crawl inside. After that, there had been no movement, no sound. I was growing agitated and nervous, wondering if I should follow her down, when the panel slid aside again. My heart leapt in my throat as one of the strangers—this one in a red anorak—came out. Then, after a moment, the other followed. A sudden panic seized me that Sophie was not going to come out at all, but then I saw her smaller figure straighten up in the shadow of the barn. Then the three of them stood for a while—talking, I supposed—before splitting up. Sophie started out across the field that would bring her back to me, while the two strangers cut across to join the lane farther down, near the main road. I waited impatiently for her to reach me.

  “What’s happened?” I demanded. “Who were they?”

  “Hang on a minute, for heaven’s sake. I’ll tell you everything once I’ve got my breath back.” She sat down on the top of the wall and swung her feet. “Right. Like we thought, they’re kids. Older than us.” A curious expression came over her face. “One of them’s thirteen and the other’s fifteen. Ah . . . they’re called Andrew and Steven.” She smiled, almost. “You remember getting beaten up at school? About a couple of years ago?”

  “No,” I said, puzzled.

  “Yes you do. We got the rest of the day off 'cos I broke a tooth.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “That was you that got beaten up.”

  “You do remember. Well, Andrew of the barn is also Andrew of the playground bullying—the one they kicked out. And Steven’s his older brother.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The details of the incident, two years previously, had faded and become smudged in my mind. I wasn’t even sure I could remember the faces of the boys involved, and besides, once they’d left the school, they had vanished from my life so utterly I hadn’t given them a second thought. I’d certainly never expected to see either of them again.

  I said, “Do they—I mean, does he remember you? What he did to you?”

  Sophie’s curious expression became more noticeable. “Yeah, he certainly does. But time changes people, you know. I don’t think he’s . . . still bullying people, if that’s what worries you.” She yawned casually. “In fact, I thought it would be fun if we all got together some time. They’re around on Wednesday, so we’ll meet up then.”

  “I thought you wanted the barn to be a special place?” I said, rather astonished.

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have friends round. And you said something about a club, right?” she added brightly, as if she’d just remembered it.

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “Great. It’ll be good to have some people to talk to. You’ll like Andrew, probably. And Steven’s OK as well.” She brushed loose hair out of her eyes. “I think I’ve had enough of this. Want to go to the quarry for a while?”

  Remembering Leonardo, and my resolution to get a closer look at the quarry books, I nodded assent. “Yeah, that would be OK.”

  He looks at me, almost accusingly. “Tell me about the barn,” he says.

  “What do you want to know?” I say, hoping for more time.

  “Just tell me why you chose it.”

  It is a challenge; I can see that clearly now. A test. Instinctively, I think I may be able to answer; I remind myself of what he sees me as. Why the barn?

  I have it, and at the same moment I know I am right. “It was a trap,” I say, trying to keep the fierce pleasure out of my voice. “Too public to be a secret place, Mattie. But safe from adults. Very specialized. The only sort of people who’d want a place like that would be—”

  “People like you,” he finishes. “People with something to hide.” His voice is extremely quiet, almost a whisper, but his eyes seem stronger than ever. “You set it up. So casually, too. It was never even supposed to be like the quarry.”

  “No,” I agree.

  He rubs his face. “Shit.” There’s a pause. Then he says, “You called me Mattie.”

  “I did?” I can’t remember. Perhaps I did. Only because he keeps calling himself that.

  “Yes, you did.” His eyes sparkle in the candlelight. “Strange. Some things never change.”

  “That’s not what you said,” I say. Abruptly I am scared, not at all certain where the conversation has just gone. I can feel us brushing past things that I don’t understand. “You said that time changes things.”

  He laughs softly. “Oh, very good, Sophie. Very good. But that’s not what I said; it’s what you said. So cut out the fucking game-playing, will you? I’m not a kid anymore. And I know you.”

  I nod dumbly. He hasn’t raised his voice, but for the first time since he hit me I am afraid for my life.

  After a long while, he says, “So. Let’s get back to it all.” I find that I am shivering uncontrollably.

  Scrambling down the shallow side of the quarry, the loose scree kept slipping out from under our feet; it was slick with rainwater from the night before. The brown weeds at one end were even more ragged, while, at the other, there were trails of stain marring the rock just below the bars of the cages. Sophie went to get the quarry bag, while I feigned lack of interest, throwing stones into the weeds and wandering about aimlessly.

  After a while, Sophie returned and set the bag down on a large rock. Still casually, I went over to join her, squatting down and picking through the old fossils in the bag. She looked at me—I thought I saw curiosity in the look—and I said, “When we’ve finished the plane, I could launch it from over there. From the top.” I pointed to the rim of the quarry above the cages.

  Apparently satisfied, Sophie nodded. “Yeah, why not? If it does crash, though, you’re going to fuck up your plane pretty badly.” She opened the biscuit tin, took out the plastic bag with the books in, and opened it.

  “What are you writing today?” I asked, knowing that I would only get half a reply.

  “Just things,” she said. “What’s happened. You know.”

  “Yeah.” I got up and wandered away again, feeling my stomach turn queasy. I still hadn’t had a look at the quarry books, but it was important that I didn’t show too much interest. It was also important that I didn’t show too little; being with Sophie had attuned me to the correct way of lying, and I was surprised—and vaguely pleased—to notice that she hadn’t seen anything odd. She was bent over the book, scribbling away in Biro, as I walked round the perimeter of the quarry as slowly as I could. I watched the sky, tried to think about the balsa Spitfire, anything to keep myself looking as I usually did. The problem was that I had no real idea of how I usually looked, while Sophie would know only too well. I turned and ambled back the way I’d come, aching to move faster, not daring to. I picked up stones and threw them, hummed songs from the radio. Eventually I decided it was enough; if I waited much longer, Sophie would finish up and the books would be put away. It occurred to me that I could always come back on my own, look at the quarry books at my leisure: but I dismissed the thought at once. The walk up to the top of the quarry hill was not really a long one—five or ten minutes, at the most—but the little path worn to the side of the dry-stone wall was exposed to view from our house, and if Sophie saw me, she would know where I was going. On top of this, although I had often replaced the bag for her at the end of a quarry afternoon, she always packaged up the books in their biscuit tin herself. What if there was some secret way of folding the plastic bag, or some particular scratch on the tin lid that had to
be lined up? The possibilities were too numerous to consider.

  I stopped by her shoulder. “I’m bored,” I said. “Are you nearly finished? I want to go to see the barn.”

  “Nearly finished,” she agreed. She completed the line she had been writing with a funny slash mark and looked up at me. “Why don’t you go and see what the view’s like from your launchpad? See if it’s suitable? I’ll join you in a bit.”

  “OK,” I agreed. The letters themselves were normal, but there were funny symbols like the slash mark, and the order of the letters made no sense. They were in evenly spaced blocks, as well, which didn’t look anything like normal words. “I’ll wave when I’m there.”

  “Right.” She bent back over her work and I turned and left. I was trying to remember whether the quarry books had always looked the way they did now; it seemed to me that they hadn’t, that there had been a time when the strange scribbles looked more like normal words, only muddled and nonsensical. But I’d first seen the quarry books—when? When I was much younger, certainly. Perhaps as young as four, I hazarded; after all, they were so much a part of my life when I was five that I couldn’t remember a time without them. I worked my way carefully up the uneven slope towards the top of the quarry, watching where I put my feet among the loose shale. Perhaps the quarry books had changed. It didn’t seem to be unreasonable. Sophie was older, after all. Leonardo’s quarry-writing was very different—his was mirror-writing, Miss Finch had said—but I could see easily enough that the principle was identical, even if the method wasn’t. Leonardo had wanted to keep his inventions secret. Sophie’s secrets were probably very different, but her reasons were the same: she didn’t want anyone else to know. Out of breath, I reached the top of the quarry and paused to take a dose of the inhaler I kept in my pocket.

  By this time of the autumn, the quarry was rimmed with golds and coppers, the trees that normally fringed its edges turning to the colour of beaten metals. There was a deep layer of husks and fallen leaves on the ground where I ducked down under the barbed wire and made my way outside the fence that rimmed the quarry. The very edge was crumbling a little, and, as you came up the path from the quarry floor, you could see where the rock had fallen away and there was a protruding rim of packed earth, about a foot thick, that was unsupported from below. For these reasons, the plane launch would have to be made from about four or five feet back. I walked round through the woods until I was at the right place, and then pushed through the bushes to the fence, looking for a gap or a place to climb over. I found it easily enough, where a branch had fallen and brought the tangle of wire and grey boards to the ground. I stepped through carefully, and edged forward until I could see the floor of the quarry. For a few seconds it was empty, and then Sophie appeared, walking away from my vantage point towards the exit. She had been out of sight, replacing the quarry bag near the cages beneath me.

  The thought of the cages made me shudder; wherever they went, it was somewhere in the rock under my feet.

  “Hi!” I called out. Sophie stopped, turned, and waved silently at me before starting up the path. I backed cautiously away from the edge and went round to meet her. All the time, a tiny, triumphant voice inside me was exultant: it was nothing much, just a glimpse at the quarry books, but I had found out a weakness in Sophie. She didn’t believe that I could fool her, and I could, because she had taught me how.

  He lapses into silence, leaving me with the last words he spoke running through my head. It’s ironic; Matthew, as a child, carefully gleans fragments of information about Sophie, gradually building up a better picture of this girl that he knows but doesn’t know. And now, years later, everything is reversed, and it is he who is under scrutiny, he whose every move is studied and appraised. And for much the same reasons.

  ten

  Wednesday came, and when we arrived home after school, Sophie began at once to change into her jeans and anorak. There was a fine drizzle falling outside, and the day was cold.

  “Where are you going?”

  She grinned. “Short memory, you have. Back to the barn. We said we’d meet Andy and Steve there today.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  “I’ve spoken to Mummy,” she added. “We can take tea with us.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Get a coat on, for heaven’s sake. You can’t go out like that.”

  “OK,” I agreed, and ran upstairs, wondering how it was that Sophie could extract concessions from my mother so easily.

  We reached the barn first, as Sophie had intended. “Don’t let on about the second room,” she warned. “That’s still just for us. We’ll sit up here and wait.” We settled ourselves on bales of straw in the upper, open room of our straw fortress, and talked about school for a while.

  After half an hour or so, there was a clatter from the metal sheeting and we both fell silent. The panel swung aside, and a hunched figure in a red anorak squeezed through.

  “Shit,” I heard him say. “I think I cut my hand.”

  “Get inside,” someone else said. “It’s cold out here.”

  The second figure followed and straightened up.

  “Anyone here?”

  Sophie stood up and jumped over the wall of the fort. “Yeah. Hi. I’ve got Mattie with me today,” she said. “He’s nine but he’s OK.”

  The older boy laughed. “You sound pretty cocky,” he said.

  “She’s always cocky,” the other one said. Neither of them sounded very confident, though, and I felt some of the tension that had gathered in my chest dissipate. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember either of these boys, and yet the younger one—who must be Andy—was the one who had hurt Sophie at school.

  “Come on up,” she said. They followed her awkwardly up the series of little steps until they were all in the upper room, looking about them diffidently.

  “This is OK,” Andy said. “You do this yourself?”

  “No,” Sophie replied. “It was all pretty much like this when we found the place. We shifted one or two of the bales to make that wall. They’re pretty heavy.”

  “You’re pretty small, that’s all,” the older boy—Steven—said. He was grinning.

  “Shut up,” Andy said uncomfortably. “It’s OK.” I realized, with insight that was unusual for me, that he had known Sophie for longer than Steven, and I wondered immediately what he was feeling right now. When Sophie spoke, though, she sounded neither tense nor affronted.

  “Sit down,” she said. “It’s a bit rough, but so what.”

  “How'd you find this place?” Andy asked.

  “Just lucky, I suppose,” Sophie said. “It’s empty.”

  “No shit,” Steven said. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one, throwing the spent match over the side of the fort.

  “You’re going to have to watch that, in here,” Sophie said quietly. “I can think of nicer ways to die.”

  “Why, are you scared?” Steven said, grinning. There was a pause, and then Sophie grinned back.

  “Can you smell burning?” she asked.

  “Don’t be stupid. I blew it out.”

  “You didn’t,” she said. “You waved it, but it didn’t go out. Now who’s stupid?”

  I was watching this with wide eyes. When Sophie had spoken, I hadn’t been able to smell anything, but now it seemed that she was right; there was the faintest scent of burning straw in the air. I glanced at Andy, and by his expression I guessed he could smell it, too.

  “Bullshit,” Steven said, but he sounded less sure.

  “I can smell smoke,” Sophie said. “If we sit here much longer, we’re not going to be able to get down.” She was speaking calmly, but there was just the right note of urgency in her voice to make it authentic. Abruptly, the smell of smoke in my nostrils died, became just the smell of straw and wet clothing. But I could see that Steven was smelling it now, and I could see that he was starting to believe.

  “Shit, Steve,” Andy muttered. “I can smell it, too—
”

  “It’s bullshit,” Steven said, but he was standing up even as he said it, and there was ill-concealed panic in his eyes. “I blew it out—”

  He crossed to the parapet and leant out over it, scanning the straw below.

  Sophie grinned. “Just a joke,” she said. “You did blow it out. Really.”

  There was a long silence. Steven turned round slowly and looked at her. For a moment, I thought he was going to hit her, and I knew that there was not a thing I could do to stop him.

  “Steve—” Andy said again, and Steve laughed briefly.

  “Pretty good, for a twelve-year-old,” he said, and the tension was gone as easily as that. He gave Sophie a curious glance, and then sat down again. I noted with interest that Sophie had gained a year in age somewhere along the way, but neither I nor Andy remarked on it, although Andy—if he had thought—should have realized that she was still only eleven, and would be for a good nine months yet.

  “Yeah,” Sophie agreed, crossing her legs and smiling. “I would have thought Andy would have told you that.”

  Steve nodded. “OK.”

  “So, tell us about yourselves, Steve and Andy,” she said.

  They looked at one another quickly. “What do you want to know?” Andy asked.

  “What brought you out here?”

  Steve answered. “I heard the place was empty, so we came up—just to see what was around, you know.”

  “Throw a few stones, break a few windows?” Sophie said sweetly.

  “That’s kids’ stuff,” he replied flatly. “No, just looking for somewhere a bit private. I thought we might be able to get into one of the farm buildings. I think you could get into several pretty easily, if you wanted to, but I reckon they’ll be keeping an eye on them.”

  “They’re pretty obvious targets,” Sophie agreed. “So what do you get up to that you need your privacy so much?”

  Steve laughed. “Nothing that would interest you,” he said. “Your brother doesn’t have a lot to say for himself, does he? Hey, you—do you talk?”